The colourful backstory of crayons: Here’s what you didn’t know
Remember those days when you used to brighten up in happiness if someone gifted you with a box of crayons? Filling up the pages of your favourite drawing book with these wax pastels used to be a sheer act of joy. Crayons are a big hit with children as they come in different shades and sizes and are easy to work with. Okay, but how did crayons come into being? Let us find out!
Pre-crayon crayons
For those unaware, crayons are nothing but wax pastels. Anyhow, combining wax with colour pigments go back to the 16th century France when encaustic painting or the technique using hot beeswax with coloured pigment was employed to colour stone sculptures. In fact, it was around the same time that the word ‘crayons’ evolved from the French ‘crayon’, meaning ‘chalk pencil’.
This method of using coloured wax on stones soon spread across the world with the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and Filipinos trying their hands at it. In fact, inspired by this technique Europeans developed cylinder-shaped pastels from charcoal and oil. Soon, in the 1790s, another type of crayon-like colours was made in Paris that was a hybrid between an oil pastel and a modern-day crayon. This was becoming quite popular among the contemporary artists.
The world welcomes present-day crayons
Fast forward to the 19th century and all these techniques and hybrid colours moved across the continents to the USA. Now, in the start itself, Americans realised that oil pastels were not really durable or handy. As a result, they started to look for substitutes. They didn’t have to look far and found the perfect alternative in wax that made the paints stronger. A French lithographer named Joseph Lemercier is often considered to be the inventor of modern crayons. While testing out different kinds of wax realised that it was paraffin wax that was the more durable and also held the coloured pigments perfectly for a prolonged period. With the help of two American companies, he started to mass produce crayons in 1828.
Crayola launches first kids’ crayons
In 1864, a man named Joseph W. Binney established the Peekskill Chemical Company in New York that specialised in black and red colour ranges including lampblack, carbon black, charcoal, red iron oxides. When Binney senior died in 1885, his son Edwin Binney joined hands with his cousin C. Harold smith and together set up Binney and Smith. The company’s product line also changed with the name and they were now also producing shoe polishes and printing inks. However, the duo was constantly looking for lucrative business ideas.
This is when they started manufacturing slate pencils at the request of a local school principal. Now, while doing so, Binney’s focus shifted to developing something new and unique. Thus, he started researching on non-toxic and colourful drawing tools for kids. Their product line already had a wax crayon to mark leathers, barrels and crates but was highly unsuitable for children as it contained carbon black which was toxic for them. Guess what he did? He replaced carbon black with black chalk and mixed it with paraffin wax, a little bit of oil and developed the first ever kids’ crayons in 1903. They were called Crayola Crayons. The original box contained eight shades: Black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow and green. Interestingly, the name Crayola was the brainchild of Binney Junior’s wife Alice, who combined the French words ‘craie’ (chalk) and ‘oleaginous’ (oily) and coined the brand-new term.